This functionality is not needed by the normal user and can introduce unwanted dependencies on
files. It can be enabled at compile time using -DENABLE_TASK_DUMP or Makefile var DUMP=1.
Different operation systems (Unix vs. Windows) use different line ending types.
It can easily happen that users from different systems edit files and replace
all line endings of a file with the system specific version. This screws up
diffs and makes merges harder.
Git can normalize line endings for specific files and avoid this problem.
Binary files should be marked to avoid accidentally normalization.
The *.d depends files for make just list the files used when building an
object file. Removing a file listed in such a dependency file causes make to
search for a way to recreate it. This usually cannot work because these files
aren't autogenerated.
The gcc option -MP can be used to generate empty rule for these files. Removing
a file in a dependency list will then execute this empty rule and continue with
the execution of the creation of the object file. This compilation process will
then automatically correct the dependency file.
The GCC introduced Link-time optimization in GCC 4.5 (2010-04-14). This should
be long enough available that interested users have upgraded to a compiler
supporting it.
The MSVC project already enabled WholeProgramOptimization since a long time.
Enabling it by default in GCC seems to be equally valid.
The GCC manual states for different parameters that the options for compilation
must also be used when linking. The options for compilation are stored in
CXXFLAGS and added to LINK.o to fix the behavior.
Option which need this are for example -fPIC/-fPIE or -flto.
Some linker on different platforms don't handle the garbage collection
correctly and create extreme bloated binaries. Therefore, leave it to the user
to enable this feature or not.
The POSTFIX make option is useful for distributions to compile different
versions of the plugin in parallel. The object files will be stored in a
directory with the postfix appended and the linker result will also have this
postfix appended.
The CROSS_COMPILE make option can be used to automatically prepend the prefix
to all build relevant tools to seamlessly allow cross compilation without
setting each tool name separately.
Cross compiling for MinGW32 would can be done using
$ make -C projects/unix/ CROSS_COMPILE=i686-pc-mingw32- HOST_CPU=i686 UNAME=MINGW
2. Removed inline attributes which throw errors in MSVC8. This is needed for modern compilers; they know when to inline
3. Fixed errors caused by MSVC8's incompatibility with C99 local variable declarations
